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Northern Seas

Northern Seas: An Interdisciplinary Study of Human/Marine and Climate System Interactionsin Arctic North America over the Last Millennium

Project Description

The Northern Seas project assembles past climatic and ecological information from historic documents to produce a high resolution understanding of the Arctic System over time. Documents including the journals of coastal arctic traders, exploratory expedition members, ship’s logs and commercial whaling and sealing records that span the past 400 years provide daily weather and marine ecosystem conditions at the local scale. Historical records offer rich data sets on, for example, air temperature, sea surface temperature, wind velocity, sea ice conditions, and species biogeography. This data can be placed into the context of global-scale climate events such as the Little Ice Age (~1300 to 1850) and local and regional-scale human activities, thus providing a more finely nuanced portrait of the Arctic System over time. In combination with existing paleo-environmental, climatic and sea ice information, evidence from historic records advances developing frameworks for understanding system response to changing conditions in the future.